Another Burning Kingdom: Flyover Fiction

Lem Purchase is in California when a call comes in the dead of night: his younger, disturbed brother in Nebraska announces his plans to carry out an act of terrorism targeting the state capitol building in Lincoln. This isn’t the first time Lem has had to make a frantic check on Jackson. Nor is it the first time that author Robert Vivian has taken us to the haunted world of the Great Plains. Critics called Vivian’s first two books in the Tall Grass Trilogy “lyrical and harrowing” (Sven Birkerts on The Mover of Bones) and “brilliantly written” (Publishers Weekly on Lamb Bright Saviors). In this third and final volume in the trilogy, Vivian weaves the voices of Lem, Jackson, and Lem’s estranged wife, Lissa, into an American triptych of longing, remembrance, and innocence—of hopes almost fulfilled and inevitably disappointed—as we race to Jackson’s reckoning with history that must have its day.

While Jackson hatches yet another plan that rivals the first in madness and ultimately threatens Lem’s life, Lem’s reflections reveal what, and how much, that life has meant. In Jackson’s determination we encounter another view of what matters, as he clings to his apocalyptic notion of the only way in which the country can be reclaimed from its present madness.